@article{1388196,
      recid = {1388196},
      author = {Diggins, John P. and Diggins, John P.},
      title = {The rise and fall of the American left /},
      pages = {432 pages :},
      note = {Expanded version of: The American left in the twentieth  century.},
      abstract = {The American Left was born in America--not, as some would  have it, in Europe or the Third World, and the American  Left was nurtured by intellectuals and activists who read  Jefferson and Whitman before they read Marx or Mao. One  lesson this brilliant history teaches us is that the fury  of radical innocence and wounded idealism so peculiar to  American intellectual history springs from native soil. The  American Left is not a single phenomenon but four  surprising eruptions throughout the past century:. The  Lyrical Left, of the First World War years. Sometimes known  as "the New Intellectuals," its leaders, born and educated  in the United States, were uniformly mindful of America's  roots. The Old Left, as it came to be known, wrote its  agenda driven by the legacy of World War I, the hopes that  had sprung from the promise of socialism, and the clear  failure of American capitalism so manifest in the Great  Depression. The New Left of the 1960s combined a revolt  against the banalities of middle class life with civil  rights fervor and, finally, protest against America's  longest war, Vietnam. The result was one of the most  unsettled and incoherent decades in American history. And  now, much embattled by twelve years of Republican rule, we  have the contemporary Academic Left building on unfirm  ground, seeking on the one hand to question the traditional  values of the West and on the other to embrace the causes  of women and minorities long shut out of that tradition  whose future may well depend upon Western values. The  American Left is no dry-as-dust subject. Its leaders, men  and women strong in rhetoric and actions, are among the  most riveting personalities of our time--Max and Crystal  Eastman, Emma Goldman, Walter Lippmann, Eugene Debs, Norman  Thomas, Reinhold Niebuhr, Herbert Marcuse, Mario Savio,  Eldridge Cleaver, Sidney Hook, Irving Howe. These lives, so  skillfully interwoven into so important an American story,  make this book the best available history of its subject},
      url = {http://library.usi.edu/record/1388196},
}